Imagination's the world's wickedest invention.
A late acquaintance once put it this way:
It's not that I want to die. I absolutely do not
Want to die. But if I have to die, and I do,
And if I have to know I have to die, and I do,
Then I wish I were already dead. Now she was,
That long, long-lost acquaintance, therefore no more,
Therefore no longer having to imagine it, as she had,
And there I was, counting the years one way
And the days the other, reading about a long-dead
Philosopher's elaborate, immobile god, chief
Of a celestial hierarchy of divine lights and spheres,
Capable only of thinking about thinking about thinking,
The unmoved mover. The unmoved mover was the object of all desire.
It moved without moving itself because others craved it
And so moved constantly toward it. Hunger
Was only love of the unmoved mover. But
Was that unmoved mover therefore everything or nothing,
Death or more dying? For what does anything hunger? Repetition?
Life at least asked no such questions before imagination
Started looking for stories and signs in the stars.
Why did the astrologers head to Bethlehem, storywise?
To keep moving. Keep moving, blues falling down like hail.
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, tokens for a later age to imagine,
Maintenance, repair, supplies, all means to moving
To something that remains unmoved with respect to its hunger
To keep moving. Today was the biggest holiday of the year,
At least it used to be when I was my parents' child,
And I asked myself, how many of these exact days
Of this exact holiday do you, body, remember? How many
Will the daughter for whom we performed this day,
Believing in what we could not see or feel? Do we have to?
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